Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Small Production Environments

[cynic]

Friends dont let friends choose Oracle. its like placing your head in an alligators mouth and hoping it wont bite.

it's exactly the same for "free" RHEL. It is "free" until RH changes its mind.

[You-]

it's exactly the same for "free" RHEL. It is "free" until RH changes its mind.

oracle have a history of suing their customers. Red Hat dont.

You should read what they did with the free Java that bundled the free javaFX. (not the google lawsuit, that is something else)

Red Hat have gone beyond what they are legally required to do. Without their assistance, even OEL would struggle as Red Hat only need to release source code to their customers and only for the copyleft stuff. They do not need to release it for permissive licenses such as BSD or MIT.

They also supported the Centos project with manpower and technical support when Centos was struggling with its job of being a clone of RHEL (IIRC, Centos 6 timeframe). Centos had its rock solid reputation due to the input of Red Hat.

being salty about Red Hat is just bonkers. considering how far beyond their requirements they go.

I personally have a dilemma over the next year to decide where to move my 2 production systems, Centos Stream or RHEL (though one may stick to Centos 7 with the additional repositories I have already set up on it). My development VM will be going Centos Stream when I get around to it (though that may be scrapped in favour of containers and UBI.)

[Alex/AT]

EDIT - if you want a non-red hat option (and not Suse or Debian), look at rocky linux or the one by Cloud Linux. Anything but making Oracle more powerful

You see, that was the case with MySQL initially as well. MariaDB & Percona did the forks, and they went good for years.
But actually, now it seems Oracle finally got over the workflow and processes transition and is really investing more to it. Optimizer tuning, descending indexes, and much more helpful stuff actually got in and the version 8 is actually evolving. I just hope they adopt Galera inside at some further point on like the forks do. Then it would be the time to move back and switch to their support team. Hopefully, part of the fork teams will also get back on track with that.
At the same time, Percona & MariaDB dropped their key features like TokuDB and some other stuff, and are progressing very unsteadily now, with a lot of unresolved issues and critical bugs that don't get fixed for months, along with futile attempts to catch up with the real deal - the internals of the database engine. They have their support customers, sure, but the steps they are taking in effort to reduce the burden may now make those move back.
The money and scale of the team & effort really plays a role there, and while the huge corp may be very slow to evolve, especially for the opensourced product, if they take it seriously, they finally do it right. The large scale of their teams help them to handle the load that becomes an unbearable burden on smaller ones.

And yeah, the point of all this messy write is: Oracle genuinely feels like they are seriously investing into their opensource product parts. Earning trust is not that easy, but it seems their opensource efforts can be trusted. OEL included. UEK kernel has a very long story, and they never ceased to evolve it despite it being 'custom' and 'optional' even for their own platforms. Personally I think they invest because that's one of the important ways their teams can learn things from and stay up to speed.

Also don't forget Red Hat is no more Red Hat. It's IBM. So we are talking around equal scale sharks here.

[whitecat]

EDIT - if you want a non-red hat option (and not Suse or Debian), look at rocky linux or the one by Cloud Linux.

Oh yeah ! Send me the link to download the ISO !!
Oh I forgot, these distro doesn't exists...
The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux. That's sad but true. I have production system to install TODAY... not in 10 months. I will clearly not install CentOS 8 now, neither CentOS 7. So what do I do ?

[pal666]

I prefer rolling and would use Stream if I were picking a RH based distribution; just not a fan of six month dist upgrades so Fedora wouldn't be my first choice.

fedora has updates every day, you don't have to wait 6 months

[pal666]

Second why use this over Rocky?

because it exists?

[pal666]

This IT guy will not recommend RedHat for anything.

judging by market share people rarely listen to you

[pal666]

If RHEL is so great is because millions of people use and test fedora in pratically every configuration and setup you can imagine and provide a lot of feedback, and sometimes fixes, by the user.

fedora isn't the most popular linux distro, i.e. something else should be even greater than rhel, according to your theory

It the last 20 years RH created a perfect equilibrium between the community and the enterprise and it was a win-win situation.

Now they completely screwed it.

now all fedora users will run away or what?

[You-]

I also dont think you can guarantee OEL to be the same without the Centos backing. With Centos doing the heavy lifting Oracle had an easy job.

I havent kept up with the MariaDB/Mysql debate since moving to MariaDB ages ago.

Today, if i wasnt going to choose Centos Stream, I would still use Centos 8. No decision needs to be made for an alternative until later in the year, by which point if you want a RHEL clone, RHEL is the best option. If you want a rebuild, that is also an option and if you want the latest updates without being artificially held back for a period of 6 months to a year, that is also an option.

[pal666]

The only viable solution now is Oracle Linux. That's sad but true. I have production system to install TODAY... not in 10 months. I will clearly not install CentOS 8 now, neither CentOS 7. So what do I do ?

jump into window?